Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  “Let me do that,” he said, motioning to her arms. “They’ve got cotton around here somewhere, and you’re really not strong enough to take on an infection.”

  He started where she left off, putting pressure on the first couple she’d pulled.

  “I’ve kind of made a mess of things for you, haven’t I?” he asked.

  “Which thing are you talking about?” Cassie asked. He motioned with his head toward the door.

  “Your life here.”

  “They can keep it,” Cassie said. He snorted under his breath and band-aided the cotton to her arm, moving on to the next IV.

  “Don’t be so quick to throw away your home,” he said softly.

  “Why does she hate you?” Cassie asked.

  “I need you to tell me what happened,” he answered. She shook her head.

  “I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out, myself. How did you know I was going to break out now?”

  “You’re leaving,” he said, smiling without looking at her. “It’s how you would balance risk and control. If they’re talking about discharging you tomorrow, odds are very good they know enough to do it tonight, they just aren’t willing to, just in case. You assert control by proving they can’t keep you here, but no earlier than they already know that it’s safe for you to go home.” He glanced at her. “You’re predictable, Calista.”

  “Down to the minute?” she asked. He grinned.

  “I’d have been here ninety seconds earlier, but there was a nurse in the hallway determined to see me.”

  “You can be invisible?”

  “After a fashion,” he said, pulling another needle. Cassie clenched her teeth and looked away.

  “That hurts?” he asked.

  “All the way down my arm,” she said. There was a hesitation and she looked back. He was looking at the fluid bag at the other end of the tubing. “What is it?”

  “I think I need to steal this,” he said.

  “Fine with me,” Cassie answered. “They were just going to pump it all into my arm, anyway.”

  He nodded and unhooked it, tossing it into her lap. She wrestled with her body to sit up a bit further, feeling for the first time like she was actually leaving.

  “What’s going on out there?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “Knowing won’t change anything. Let it go for tonight.”

  “It can’t be that bad if they’re letting you wander around loose,” she said.

  “Things are wrong,” he said. “You’ll see, in your own time.” He looked up at a monitor. “Let’s just do one thing at a time. When I disconnect this an alarm is going to go off. We have maybe a minute to get you into the chair and out of here before everything converges. You ready?”

  She shifted higher in the bed.

  “Unlock the rail, here.”

  He nodded and glided the wheelchair over to the near side of the bed, then dropped the rail. She braced herself, then nodded. He pulled the monitors in a swift series of motions, machine after machine going off and a light in the hallway flashing brightly enough that Cassie could see it through the blinds.

  She slid to the edge of the bed and took a breath. Jesse put an arm around her back and she sucked air through her teeth as her knee dropped toward the floor. He hesitated.

  “Just do it,” she said. He nodded and pulled her off the bed and into the wheelchair. She grunted and he waited for her to nod, then pulled the blanket off the bed across her lap.

  “Keep the solution out of sight,” he said, starting toward the door. The guard opened it.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I need to get her to surgery,” Jesse answered, pushing the wheelchair toward the door. “She’s had a lot of work come loose.”

  “You aren’t supposed to be in here,” the guard said.

  “You willing to be the one responsible for her dying?” Jesse asked. The guard looked concerned, then took a step back.

  “I’m going with you,” he said. Jesse nodded.

  “That’s fine. We need to move now, though.”

  The guard held the door open as Jesse wheeled Cassie through it, then Jesse turned.

  “You should guard the room,” he said.

  “I’m assigned to guard her,” the man answered.

  “I think someone tampered with her equipment. I need you to watch it to make sure no one comes or goes.”

  Cassie was watching doctors and other medical staff coming down the hallway toward her.

  “The hell I will,” the guard answered. There was a pause and Cassie turned to look at Jesse. Jesse was watching the doctors.

  “Is that everyone?” he asked.

  “What?” the guard answered, putting a hand on Cassie’s wheelchair. Jesse tapped on his arm for a moment, and then the hallway went still. Jesse began pushing Cassie through a maze of people moving in slow motion down the hallway.

  “I saw that in a movie once,” she said.

  “Dare you to make one,” he answered. She pulled the blanket a little closer, feeling slightly as though it was all that was keeping her insides from spilling out, and then they rounded a corner.

  Everything was normal, here.

  Jesse wove her through the hallway, holding still now, rolling slowly, and then putting on a burst of speed as people moved. She realized that no one was looking at them.

  “How are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Hush, DC,” he said.

  She grinned and settled a little lower in the chair. She imagined that she could feel the painkillers leaving her system, the ache spreading across her abdomen that was only going to get sharper with time, and she braced herself for it. That was soldiering. Doing what needed to be done, through the pain. Ignoring the pain. Die first.

  They got onto the elevator.

  “How did you do that?” she asked.

  “You aren’t the only predictable one,” he said. “Now stay still.”

  She leaned against the back of the chair as he paused, then pushed her forward again

  “Look over your left shoulder,” he murmured. She turned as far as she could comfortably twist and glanced behind her.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “Aren’t supposed to,” he answered, pushing her onto an elevator. “Just wanted to make sure she didn’t see your face. That same nurse. She’s very interesting.”

  “You want to go back and talk to her?” Cassie asked. “Maybe get her number?”

  “Like I would need that to contact her,” Jesse said. Cassie felt like he was missing the point, but was too tired to fight with him.

  The elevator was very slow.

  Cassie wondered why a hospital would have such a slow elevator, given that surely going up and down floors was important.

  Right?

  “I’m curious,” Jesse said after a space. “Exactly how were you planning on getting out?”

  “Make them stop me,” she said. She heard him laugh.

  “An overweight bunny rabbit could stop you, right now.”

  “Maybe once,” she said. “Like to see him try it the second time, though.”

  Something slid over her shoulder and into her lap. She looked down to find the Adena Lampak knife in a new sheath.

  “I’d forgotten about that,” she said.

  “Understandable, but it’s a valuable gift,” Jesse said. “Try not to lose it.”

  She tucked it under the blanket, happy to be armed.

  “How bad was it, really?” she asked.

  “Was what?” he asked.

  “What happened to me.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Liar.”

  “It’s the truth,” he complained.

  “But you’re using it to hide what you do know,” she said. The elevator doors dinged and Cassie sensed that she was supposed to be still. Jesse rolled the wheelchair back slowly as medical professionals and civilians got on with them, ignoring them. The doors slid closed again.
>
  “Fascinating minds,” Jesse said. No one showed even a flicker of acknowledgment.

  “Is that healthy?” Cassie asked, looking around the elevator.

  “What?” Jesse asked.

  “Whatever you’re doing.”

  “Well, the not noticing us thing is maybe a little questionable, but the selective white noise so that they don’t hear us is pretty standard technology.”

  “Then why can we hear each other?”

  She heard him grin.

  “That’s the clever part.”

  She sighed.

  “How slow is this elevator?”

  “I had to practice this route,” Jesse said, suggesting with his voice that she should feel sorry for him.

  “You haven’t answered me,” she said.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Jesse said. “Just tapping into subconscious interests and fears. Archetypal stuff, really.”

  “Not that question,” she growled.

  “I know,” he said. “She put a bullet in you. Not one you and your doctors recognize, when it isn’t in your stomach, but a bullet. That was pretty straightforward.”

  “But…?”

  “There’s more,” Jesse said. “That’s what I don’t understand. I don’t know why. What she would have been trying to accomplish.”

  “The swizzles,” Cassie said. There was a pause.

  “They weren’t going to tell you about them.”

  “I laid in a bed for three weeks,” Cassie said. “People are people.”

  “Yes they are.”

  “What are they?”

  “People.”

  “Idiot.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The doors to the elevator opened again and Jesse slid Cassie forward with the group, then turned and headed for the front door.

  No one stopped them.

  She lay on the couch for hours, unable to find a position that didn’t hurt. Jesse did what he could for her, but there was an unspoken agreement that he wasn’t going to use his knowledge or his abilities to help her on this side of a jump. Here she was human, and she used human solutions to problems.

  Eventually Troy came down with a bottle of bourbon.

  Her thoughts were muddled with discomfort, but she lay with her head in Troy’s lap and drank hard liquor until she didn’t remember anything more.

  The MPs were waiting for her in the morning.

  She wasn’t surprised. Not exactly. She’d expected a summons of some kind. This might have been a bit more strongly-expressed than she’d anticipated, but the new general was the more emphatic type. She sat up on the couch, straightening the tangle of blankets to get her legs out and feeling how her hair stuck to her face on the one side.

  “I need a shower,” she said.

  “You’re under arrest,” one of the MPs said. She frowned.

  “Are we still playing that game?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. She sighed.

  “Charges?”

  “Dereliction of duty and disobeying a direct order.”

  She blinked at him.

  “We are still playing that game,” she said. “Where’s Jesse?”

  “The Jalnian has been escorted separately to be interviewed,” the second MP said. She wished she could have watched that.

  “Guys,” Cassie said. “You really expect to take me like this?”

  She unstuck hair from her cheek, then raised an eyebrow at them. The first one looked abashed; the second one hadn’t much wiggled from his coat-hanger posture since she’d first sat up.

  “We have orders, ma’am,” the first said. She scratched her face and sighed.

  “Not like I haven’t been there,” she said. “How long have you been in?”

  “Three years,” he said. “You’ll come quietly?”

  “I’m going to need help to get anywhere,” she said, testing her body. The sleep had helped - every day was better than the one before - but she wasn’t sure she could walk on her own yet. “If you’re asking me not to yell and make a scene, I can probably agree to that.”

  The second one stood as the first came to help her off the couch.

  “They didn’t say, ma’am,” he said as he stood under her arm.

  “That I’d been shot in the stomach and wasn’t exactly in prime condition?”

  “That you’d be this weak.”

  She gritted her teeth.

  “I could still gut you where you stand,” she said. She felt him laugh in his chest.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The soldier escorted her gently to the elevators and down to a waiting car where he sat in the back seat with her while his partner rode in the front with the driver.

  She tried to remember what Troy and Jesse had talked about the night before. There had been important conversation going on; she’d known that at the time, but the pain had kind of been forefront to her attention, and Troy had shown no hesitation getting her drunk. Obviously he hadn’t expected her to participate in the conversation that actively.

  There had been something, though. The thread of it had been something that she had tried to keep tabs on somewhere off in her secondary mind to look at later.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t remember it.

  They made their way to the administrative building, where the same man helped Cassie into a chair. They sat down across the hallway from her and they waited.

  Cassie figured it was much like any other interrogation.

  Let them sweat it out, work themselves up before you ever asked your first question.

  She picked at her nails.

  She wondered what Jesse had done with the Adena Lampak knife, hoping he’d put it somewhere safe.

  Eventually a clerk came out and told her that ‘they’ were ready for her now. She put up a hand to stop the MP from helping her, and limped her way into the room to find a panel of ranking officers facing her. General Donohue sat at the center, paging through a stack of papers.

  She stood at attention and one of the old guard officers looked at her, horrified.

  “We understood you to be in much better condition, physically,” he said. “Maybe we should do this another day.”

  “The Lieutenant was well enough to check herself out of the hospital against medical advice,” General Donovan said. “We will do this now.”

  Cassie waited, the muscle structure in her abdomen shooting white hot pain from her shoulders to her knees. General Donovan reorganized his papers again, then looked up.

  “Have a seat.”

  She tried not to show relief as she lowered herself into the chair, doing a quick organization to get as comfortable as she could without fidgeting.

  “Do you understand why you’re here?” the General asked. Cassie bit back sarcasm.

  “I understand I’ve been arrested,” she said. “If any of this is going to be recorded or used later, I’d like to start out by speaking with a lawyer.”

  “We would prefer to keep this more informal for now,” the man sitting to the General’s left said. He was a hard man, from the look of him. The kind of officer Cassie would have respected under other circumstances. She looked him in the eye.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How did you get out of the hospital?” General Donovan asked.

  “Jesse came and got me,” she said.

  “We’ve seen the footage from hospital security,” the general said. “I want to know how you walked out without anyone so much as saying a word to you.”

  “Might have been a busy day,” Cassie said.

  “This will progress to a formal hearing and trial very quickly if you refuse to engage our questions,” a female officer said. Cassie turned to look at her. Cassie turned her head to look directly at the woman.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The Jalnian spoke to the guard before you left,” she said. “The guard doesn’t remember this conversation. How did he do that?”

&nbs
p; “How is that relevant to the charges against me?” Cassie asked.

  “You’re being evaluated for competency as the foreign terrestrial’s commanding officer,” General Donovan said. “At this stage, you should have a sound working understanding of his capabilities. Anything less than that is a disappointment to your training and your peers, and we must consider holding you accountable for it.”

  Ah.

  “What happens when you turn your computer on, sir?” Cassie asked. His eyebrows went up a fraction. She waited, but he wasn’t going to take the bait. “What does it do, when it boots up? How does it connect to the global networks and transfer data back and forth with other computing devices? Do you know what a transistor is, sir?” She didn’t. She waited. He sighed, giving her a dismissive handwave.

  “Get to your point, Lieutenant.”

  “You know what it is, sir. Jesse is, according to our own intelligence, more complex and more capable than our computing devices. You want me to tell you how he works. I’m still routinely surprised by what he can do. If he, as a foreign terrestrial, is a computer, I am still a casual user. You’re looking for a hacker.” She paused, keeping her face still, even as she smiled internally. “And I think that we all understand that any idea we have of using that man is severely misplaced. He does what he wants to for his own reasons, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to observe him.”

  “This was never the goal of your assignment, Lieutenant,” the general said. She folded her hands in her lap, watching him. What was his game?

  “Sir, I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I’ve offered you incentive after incentive,” the general said, drawing looks from the other officers. “You are in an enviable position. No other member of your order would treat this responsibility so casually. Disrespectfully. But you must remember that you are a member of the intelligence community. Your task has been and always will be gathering information and bringing it back to those of us who intend to use it.”

  The sting to this was unexpectedly strong. Even if that had been her main job description as an agent, and it was hard to argue that an analyst was anything other than an intelligence position, she couldn’t let it pass.

  “No, sir,” she said. “I am an officer of the United States Air Force. I fight. I win. As a member of the portal project, I represent humanity to the species of the universe, and I establish plausible contact. I see what I see, and I keep the secrets entrusted to me. Maybe the officers reporting to you in the Navy were data widgets, but we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that. Sir.”